Microsoft has its ups and downs, and it is about due for an up in the mobile space. So it will either be great or totally suck.
Well, it's not like we have lots of new info about the Mac version of Civ V to discuss, so ...
I had my hands on an iPad for the first time yesterday -- a co-worker had bought one after a tech showed him his (we are a Microsoft-only company where all the tech staff uses Macs at home) -- and it is really, truly, one of those OMG things. Not so much the interface, which is just a bigger version of the iPhone / iPod Touch, but the way it feels when you hold it, its weight, how solid it is. The ebook readers I've picked up all felt like, well, plastic. The iPad, on the other hand, is the mobile gadget equivalent to a well-balanced sword. You pick it up and go, wow.
Two more co-works said, okay, they were going to buy one now too. It is sort of like an infection. My wife and I are going to wait until Christmas.
Microsoft's problem is not that they can't create great software (at least when their developers manage to fight off the mindless marketing droids of death), it is that they have no control over the total package. You can live with ugly desktop computers, but the moment you are talking about something mobile, it can't look, like, say, a Zune or your generic Dell plastic-case laptop. You need something that people will like to show off, like the first iPhone, like the iPad. Silly, but true.
Apple has
Jonathan Ive, who in interviews comes across as rather, um, odd, and obviously marches to his own drummer, but just so happens to be brilliant. His boss, Steve Jobs, might be a borderline psychotic ego-maniac, but knows when to let the creative guys do their stuff (something the Pixar people keep talking about -- Jobs stays out of the creative process). So you need a genius designer and a boss who doesn't have to poke his nose in everything, and keeps the marketing people off the backs of the developers and designers.
This is not Microsoft. They do not have this kind of design talent, and Steve Ballmer is not a visionary. This will not work, unless they rip their corporate culture up and start over again in a garage. Given their current profits, they are not going to change a thing, or at least not enough. They are not going to do well in mobile, short of nuking Infinity Drive.
The question for us is, of course, can you put a version of Civ V that is not like Revolution
(hiss!) on the iPad. The screen isn't huge, but moving units with your fingers should be awesome. That's the next question for Firaxis once we have the OS X version out the door. Sometime.
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